Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies
Iain Campbell editor Dominic Smith editor Natasha Lushetich editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:23rd Nov '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Technology is a host of social, material, and epistemic transformation techniques, tools, and methods. The common perception of digital technology today is that it is determined, even over-determined. This volume suggests a different view: the digital is indeterminate. Mobilising insights from philosophy, art and architecture theory, mathematics, computer science and anthropology, it situates digital indeterminacy within the wider context of material and immaterial processes, causations, triggerings, and their performative working.
The book’s tripartite structure reflects technology’s inherent capacity to transform knowledges, practices, and time. Part I: Social-Digital Technologies juxtaposes arguments for machinic indeterminacy to those of overdetermination in blockchain, cognitive augmentation, and digital ideology. Part II: Spatial, Temporal, Aural and Visual Technologies delves deeper into received ideas about technologies for building spatial structures, manufacturing instruments and constructing the visual space. Part III: Epistemic Technologies analyses the use of plasticity in cognitive science, contingency in thinking habits, ontogenesis in experimental computing, and divination techniques with an inbuilt margin of indeterminacy.
List of contributors: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Iain Campbell, Stephen Darren Dougherty, Aden Evens, Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra, Stavros Kousoulas, Natasha Lushetich, Peteer Müürsepp, Luciana Parisi, Andrej Radman, Alesha Serada, Dominic Smith, Sha Xin Wei, Joel White, Ashley Woodward, and David Zeitlyn.
Is the process of technological innovation an opening up of possibilities or a predetermined production of commodities? Through the analysis of concrete examples of smart technologies and artificial intelligent systems, the authors collectively brilliantly thematize a new modality of the future, that lies between contingency and necessity. Its name is plasticity. A fascinating endeavor. -- Catherine Malabou, Kingston University and University of California at Irvine
Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies is a major contribution to the philosophy of technology and the literature of uncertainty. Within our theories of technology as the automated, probable, likely, replicable, and reliable, this book opens up a universe of the accidental, contingent, aleatoric, indeterminate, chaotic, and messy. It will unsettle your thinking. -- Finn P. Brunton, University of California, Davis
This is a diverse collection of essays on urgent questions imposed by technologies that condition the “everyday” of a digitized capitalism. The impressive range of responses is an invitation to transgress disciplinary boundaries and commit to (re)creating a space where important problems can, first of all, be thought. -- Vladimir Tasic, University of New Brunswick
ISBN: 9781538171578
Dimensions: 237mm x 159mm x 25mm
Weight: 640g
336 pages